POC21: A Look Into 5 Weeks of Co-Making For Sustainability Benjamin Tincq – on 24 April 2015 Source – http://magazine.ouishare.net/2015/04/poc21-a-look-into-5-weeks-of-making-for-sustainability/ For a few months, OuiShare and OpenState have been preparing for POC21: a 5-week innovation camp where 100+ makers, designers, engineers and more, will join forces this summer to prototype the best open source products for a low-carbon and resource-efficient… Continue reading
Date archives "April 2015"
The Corporation: Full Length Documentary
The part about the enclosure of the commons starts at 57:57. “The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by Joel Bakan, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary is critical of the modern-day corporation, considering its legal status as a class of person and evaluating its behaviour towards society and… Continue reading
How marketplace lending has effectively killed the promise of peer to peer lending
It is for a good reason that the industry changed its label from peer-to-peer lending to marketplace lending: Peer-to-peer lending is dead. Institutional investors have taken over the entire investor side of marketplace lending. The initial idea of connecting borrowers and lenders directly has been abandoned. Excerpted from Jonathan McMillan (who visited the LendIt conference):… Continue reading
What are we greedy for?
A Spanish translation can be found here. You can also read it in Portuguese. A lot of people reacted to my comment on Facebook the other day that greed is more a symptom than a cause of our current system, with all its inequities. I’m asked, What is the cause of greed? First I’ll say… Continue reading
Better, Not More — aka Buen Vivir
Here is an inspiring five-minute video about the quest for a new post-growth economic system. “Better, Not More,” was produced by Kontent Films for the Edge Funders Alliance, and was released last week at a conference in Baltimore. The video is a beautiful set of statements from activists around the world describing what they aspire… Continue reading
The P2PF/CIC strategic plan will be presented in AureaSocial on Tuesday, May 5th
This spring brings a new collaboration between the P2P Foundation (P2PF) and the Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC), working together on a Commons Transition Plan which follows the agenda developed by the common work group formed by both teams in 2014. To start off and to raise awareness about the project, a public presentation will take… Continue reading
We need regenerative farming, not geoengineering
The quick fix mindset behind geoengineering must be transformed to one that seeks a humble partnership with nature if we are to address climate change Geoengineering has been back in the news recently after the US National Research Council endorsed a proposal to envelop the planet in a layer of sulphate aerosols to reduce solar… Continue reading
Will the next big crash be the last one?
By Eivind Berge. Original post here. As our civilization runs into limits to growth, there are several ways to analyze the situation, all with some validity in their own ways. One might for example think of limits in relation to ecosystem services, pollution and climate change, and these are certainly major challenges that I don’t… Continue reading
Call for Papers on Citizen Science
Special Issue on Citizen Science Insightful and thought provoking papers on citizen science sought for themed issue. Source – http://jcom.sissa.it/call-papers Editors Dr Emma Weitkamp, University of the West of England, Bristol Professor Bruce Lewenstein, Cornell University, Ithaca NY Citizen science, the direct participation of citizens in scientific projects, has grown rapidly in recent years. The… Continue reading
Excellent Profile of Enric Duran and Catalan Integral Cooperative
The Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC, pronounced “seek”) is surely one of the more audacious commons-based innovations to have emerged in the past five years. It is notable for providing a legal and financial superstructure that is helping to support a wide variety of smaller self-organized commons. Some of us are calling this proto-form an “omni-commons,”… Continue reading
GNU social will hold its global “Camp” together with the “Shareable Lab” in Asturias
Between the 9th and 16th of September, we’re going to revolutionize the Sharing Economy to return it to neighborhoods and citizens The discussion about collaborative consumption is reaching pretty clear positions on the role of business. As Neal Gorenflo said this week: As for Uber, Airbnb, and the other giants of for-profit sharing, “they do… Continue reading
To Save the World… Preface by Bernard Stiegler for Michel Bauwens’ new book
Michel Bauwens, peer-to-peer activist and founder of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation, has a new book out, in French, entitled Saving the World: Towards a post-capitialist society with peer-to-peer. In the book Michel, with his collaborator Jean Lievens, argues that a new distributed and de-centralised economic model is necessary to shake up the world and drive us towards a post-capitalist… Continue reading
Overview of Our Energy Modeling Problem
By Gail Tverberg. Original article here. We live in a world with limits, yet our economy needs growth. How can we expect this scenario to play out? My view is that this problem will play out as a fairly near-term financial problem, with low oil prices leading to a fall in oil production. But not… Continue reading
The invisible fabric of social cohesion
How to promote social cohesion and belonging in our neighbourhoods through Internet and why centralized corporate architectures, as twitter or airbnb, cannot. We’re so used to seeing the world from the point of view of institutions, that the most important things are hidden from us. We all “feel” it when a neighborhood or a city… Continue reading
Growing calls for sharing and justice
The STWR report ‘Sharing as our common cause’ explains how a call for sharing is consistently at the heart of civil society demands for a better world, even though this mutual concern is generally understood and couched in tacit terms. As part of STWR’s ‘global call for sharing’ campaign, it is therefore useful to highlight… Continue reading
Reclaiming the ‘real’ sharing economy
What does it actually mean ‘to share’? This might seem like an obvious question, but the concept of sharing is increasingly being debated, discussed and redefined in our modern age of rapid technological change and planetary crises. The rise of the sharing economy in recent years has given particular impetus to this debate, in which… Continue reading